Wacom tablets — and especially the Cintiq portable touch-enabled display versions — have been wildly popular with serious photographers and graphic artists for years. Until now, using one on the road has meant bringing along both a laptop and a tablet. With Wacom’s new Cintiq Companion, Windows users can have it all in one device. The Companion runs Windows 8.1 — including all of Adobe Creative Cloud’s applications — on a high-end pressure-sensitive display that supports both multi-touch and a Wacom stylus.

Unlike most Android and iOS tablets, the Companion is essentially a full laptop — minus the keyboard. It features a powerful i7 processor, 8 GB of RAM, and either a 256 GB or 512 GB solid-state disk for storage. It has mini-DisplayPort for driving an external monitor, as well as two USB 3.0 ports — handy for high-performance card readers and an external mouse or keyboard. Wacom also sells a small — but not backlit — Bluetooth keyboard.

The Companion provides a great starting point for a full, mobile, digital darkroom, but putting a workable system together still requires some planning and effort.

In the first part of this article, we explored how gradient adjustments can be made in-camera, by using a graduated neutral density filter. In Part 2, we’ll take a look at applying gradient adjustments in the post-processing part of the workflow using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.